Chances are I’ll talk Hancock into freeing me to pursue these vile heathens this very night. If not to punish them for escaping us—then to punish them for what crimes they have committed against this … this child.”
“Stay with her, Jonah,” Sweete had said in a whisper before he left the lodge. “Chances are you’re the only one she’ll let near her now. I’ll see about getting a surgeon to help her back with Hancock’s soldiers.”
That night there hadn’t been much they could do for the girl, with the exception of washing her wounds caused at the hands of those who had repeatedly raped her. It took hours before she would let one of the hospital stewards close to her. Near morning, Jonah laid the girl on some blankets at the back of an ambulance, where she slipped contentedly into sleep, her head in the lap of the steward.
As the eastern sky stretched into a bloody pink, Jonah wearily found the rest of the scouts just then beginning to move about their fires.
“You need some coffee, Jonah,” Sweete said, trudging about the low flames of his breakfast fire with his blanket draped from his shoulders, slurring the ground.
Hook settled nearby, where the old mountain man patted the ground. Jonah pulled a blanket around his own shoulders against the predawn chill. “What I need is sleep. Forget the coffee, old man.”
“You’ll want the coffee, Jonah. We’re riding out in a few minutes.”
“Not until I get some sleep, I’m not.”
“Hancock’s asked that I stay with him and California Joe. He plans on heading down to Fort Dodge from here.”
“Good. Just as long as old Thunderass don’t climb into his ambulance till I get me a little shut-eye.”
Sweete dragged the coffeepot from the fire as he cleared his throat. “You ain’t going with Hancock.”
Hook opened one eye into the murky darkness and glared at the old trapper. “What you figure on me doing—I don’t go with you?”
“Custer asked for you go with him and Hickok.”
Hook closed the one eye and sighed. “He did, did he?”
“We’re riding out soon as you have a cup of coffee,” a new voice drew close from the darkness.
With the one eye opened again, he found the dusty, prairie-crusted long hair of normally dapper James Butler Hickok hanging disheveled about his face.
“I had my way about it—there’d been a few more of you goddamned Yankees I’d a’killed afore you put a end to the war,” he grumbled.
“Rise an’ shine, friend—there’s a trail of Injuns we’re bound to follow.” Hickok ran fingers through his hair.
“Likely it’s a war we’re off to start, Bill.”
Hickok straightened, allowing the Confederate room to kick his way out of the blanket. “You’re wrong there, Reb. Wasn’t us started this war.”
In their hasty flight, the bands left only small trails for Hickok’s scouts to mull over, deciding which to follow. But follow they did, heading north in the general direction of the many dim tracks, onto the open prairie, leading Custer and his eight companies of the Seventh Cavalry rapidly behind them.
North of Walnut Creek, Hickok left the guiding in the hands of others while he motioned Hook to join him in pulling away from Custer’s column. Without a word of explanation, Hickok set a bruising pace, the rising sun constantly on his right cheek as they loped across the rolling tableland of central Kansas Territory. It was late that day when the pair reined up at a stage ranch, embers smoking still.
Hook let his eyes run over the scene quickly, then glanced at Hickok.
“You ever see something like this, Jonah?”
“I fought that war, same as you,” he answered quietly.
“I know. But—you ever see anything like that?”
Hickok pointed his Spencer carbine at the blackened, bloated bodies of the two ranch hands, burned among the charred wreckage of this way station along the Smoky Hill Road.
“I’ve smelled this afore, Hickok—in Missouri.”
Hickok nodded. “Some of the worst of it happened on the borderlands. Let’s get.”
No one had to drag him from that place. Problem was, it was only the first of many the two ran across over the next two days.
“Looks like everything west of Hays been hit, General,” Hickok explained when he and Hook dismounted before Custer that third week of April, after they had returned from their far-ranging scout.
“All the same story?” Custer asked, his blue eyes narrowing.
“Every station … burned out. All the stock run off. Workers what didn’t make it out, we found butchered,” Hook answered.
At that moment they stood among the ruins of Lookout Station, only fifteen miles west of Fort Hays. The burned bodies of three men had just been found near the smoldering debris.
“They don’t even look like something once human,” Custer muttered in something close to a curse.
“Likely, they were tortured by the red bastards,” growled a handsome soldier standing at Custer’s elbow.
“Little doubt of that, Tom,” Custer said to his younger brother. Then he suddenly turned to his adjutant, animated once more. “Mr. Moylan, pass along the order for our command to move off two miles and make camp.”
Jonah stood dumbfounded as the long-haired lieutenant colonel and his staff strode off, their shadows lengthening beneath the all but gone western sun. How many could look at this scene and not have his stomach turned? And not grow angry? Not be changed?
Agents for both the Cheyenne and the Brule Sioux gave it their best to convince Hancock to be a gracious victor.
“The bands fled only because of their fear of your amassed might, General,” declared Edward W. Wynkoop. “They’re mortally afraid of another Sand Creek massacre.” Shad Sweete had watched as Hancock’s eyes grew steely. “I am a professional soldier, Major Wynkoop. In no way similar to that minister-turned-butcher named Chivington!”
Colonel Jesse W. Leavenworth attempted his own appeal. “General, to put that village to the torch as you have been suggesting would only add to the flames already scorching the central plains. You will make war certain by not staying your hand and showing the tribes your benevolence.”
Hancock smiled, calling out to the old scout. “Mr. Sweete—that is a good one, isn’t it? Benevolence for these warrior bands?”
Shad watched both the agents turn to look in his direction in the steamy shade provided by the canvas awning strung from the top of Hancock’s ambulance. He cleared his throat. “Truth of it is, General—these bands understand only one thing. War.”
Wynkoop bolted up. “I protest, General—”
“Give my scout a chance to finish, Major Wynkoop!” growled Hancock.
“And,” Sweete continued, “the warrior bands fear only one thing. Death.”
“There,” Hancock sighed, sinking back into his canvas campaign chair. “This man’s spent his entire adult life out here in these far western regions. No one understands these Indians the way Mr. Sweete does, gentlemen.” He tapped a finger against his fleshy lower lip, then stroked it down his chin whiskers.
“Gentlemen, I’ve decided. Satisfied that this village acted in bad faith by fleeing before we had a chance to talk of peace has proved they were a nest of conspirators. This command will burn the village before we move off toward Fort Dodge.”
The next morning, 19 April, as the bulk of his troops marched south, Hancock’s selected tarried behind to set fire to the village on Pawnee Fork: 111 Cheyenne and 140 Brule Sioux lodges, along with robes, blankets, meat, utensils, parfleches filled with clothing, and abandoned travois.
Less than a week later, the general met with a delegation of Arapaho and Kiowa chiefs who had already learned of the destruction of the villages, though their bands roamed country far south of the Arkansas River. The
